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Cloning People and Jewish Law
Michael J. Broyde, Rabbi
Michael J. Broyde, Rabbi
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Abstract
"The relationship between modern technology, biomedical ethics and Jewish law has been well developed over the last fifty years. As has been noted in a variety of sources and in diverse contexts, Jewish law insists that new technologies -- and particularly new reproductive technologies -- are neither definitionally prohibited nor definitionally permissible in the eyes of Jewish law, but rather subject to a case by case analysis. Nonetheless, every legal, religious or ethical system has to insist that advances in technologies be evaluated against the touchstones of its moral systems. In the Jewish tradition, that touchstone is halacha: the corpus of Jewish law and ethics. This short paper is an attempt to create a preliminary and tentative analysis of the technology of cloning from a Jewish law perspective. Like all preliminary analysis, it is designed not to advance a rule that represents itself as definitive normative Jewish law; rather it is an attempt to outline some of the issues in the hope that others will focus on the problems and analysis found in this paper and will sharpen or correct that analysis. Such is the way that Jewish law seeks truth. In the case of cloning -- as with all advances in reproductive technology -- the Jewish tradition is betwixt and between two obligations. On one side is the general Jewish obligation to help those who are in need, and particularly exemplified by the specific obligation to reproduce, thus inclining one to permit advances in reproductive technologies that allows those unable to reproduce, to, in fact, reproduce. On the other side is the general inherent moral conservatism associated with the Jewish tradition's insistence that there is an objective God-given morality, and that not everything that humanity wants or can do is proper; this specifically is manifest in the areas of sexuality where the Jewish tradition recognizes a number of halachic doctrines which restrict sexual activity. In addition, the Jewish tradition advises one to pause before one permits that which can lead down a variety of slippery slopes whose consequences we do not fully understand, and whose results we cannot predict."(pg 1)
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2008-05-27
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With permission of the license/copyright holder